MONTREAL - By now, many people have seen the “Ici, on commerce avec amour” campaign that was launched a few weeks ago.

The web-based initiative is the brainchild of public-relations agency Provocateur Communications. Its objective is to promote “linguistic peace in Montreal.”

A number of prominent Montrealers serve as spokespeople (“ambassadors”) for the campaign, including hockey player Georges Laraque, the Hon. Marlene Jennings, journalist Tammy Emma Pepin, actors Rachelle Lefevre and Jay Baruchel, Joe Beef restaurateurs Frédéric Morin and David McMillan, and Buonanotte owner Massimo Lecas. (It was Buonanotte’s experience with the Office québécois de la langue française that made “Pastagate” headlines around the globe.) Each image features a blue-and-white logo of a fleur-de-lis wrapped in a heart. Instead of identifying the ambassadors as anglophone, francophone or allophone, the images emphasize their linguistic abilities (bilingual or trilingual, for example).

The “Ici, on commerce avec amour” messaging is a riff on the OQLF campaign “Ici on commerce en français” rolled out in 2008 through the award-winning PR company Bleublancrouge. Geared toward Montreal, where French is often perceived to be under threat, the OQLF campaign aims to encourage Quebec consumers to affirm their right to be served in French, and to persuade local businesses to operate in French.

Whether you agree with the OQLF or not, it must be acknowledged that the struggles faced by the Quebec government in its efforts to sustain a French-only agenda in the public sphere, and notably in the Montreal business world, are very real.

These struggles are due, in part, to the reality that the “French fact” in Quebec coexists with a growing “multilingual fact” in Montreal. Another obstacle for the government is that the new economy continues to globalize in a way that challenges the Quebec “national” model with its protected linguistic markets.

Joan Pujolar, a sociolinguist at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain), puts it this way: “In the global marketplace, languages increasingly acquire their value as a function of their economic significance, while their value as national symbols … become(s) secondary.”

In other words, the new economy makes it very difficult for governments to control or regulate what language people can or cannot speak in public. Language becomes less about sustaining a national project, with its categories of identity and belonging, and more about participating in the global economy.

The OQLF message, for example, is that “here” in Montreal, we do business in a particular way (in French) that binds us as a national unit.

The Provocateur Communications messaging upends this approach. It takes a social, global approach to language as an asset in Montreal (that is, with bilingualism and multilingualism something to be proud of) in a way that challenges the political messaging strategy of the Quebec government (which is that bilingualism and multilingualism are a threat).

There’s another angle to this that I think is worth mentioning.

In order to get shirts, dresses, shoes or lingerie into the shops where business is conducted “here” — H&M, Zara, La Senza or Aldo on Ste-Catherine St. for example — a whole chain of linguistic resources is required. A dress is designed for the runway in, say, Paris. A U.S. company then produces a knock-off design. The design is shipped to China, Mexico, Cambodia, Indonesia or Bangladesh, where the dress is manufactured, packaged and shipped to chain stores around the world. Then comes the marketing, to ensure it is placed before the public in a way that is relevant to the local context and consumers.

As all these steps — design, manufacturing, export processing, shipping, advertising, marketing — are carried out in countries around the world, the people involved use language as a resource to facilitate the movement of the goods across the interconnected global marketplace.

To get this stuff into Montreal stores requires probably a bare minimum of three or four languages — English, French, and maybe Bengali, Mandarin, Spanish or Tamil.

But once the items arrive in Montreal, the government expects transactions between merchants and consumers to operate in a French-only zone. Interesting, no?

The language of business in Montreal continues to be a hot topic of debate. That’s not going to change any time soon. But we are starting to see different kinds of strategies and approaches to language, identity and the public sphere emerging in Quebec from the ground up. The “Ici, on commerce en amour” campaign is one of them.

CORRECTION: Due to a reporting error, a column on Monday’s Opinion page said incorrectly that the name of the public-relations agency behind the “Ici, on commerce avec amour” campaign is Agent Provocateur. In fact the company’s name is Provocateur Communications. The Gazette regrets the error.

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